The Incurable Romantic: and Other Unsettling Revelations - Softcover

Tallis, Frank

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0349142955 ISBN 13: 9780349142951

Publisher: Abacus, 2019

'Frank Tallis brings a lifetime's clinical experience and wise reflection to a condition that, by its own strange routes, leads us into the very heart of love itself. This is a brilliant, compelling book' Ian McEwan

Love is a great leveller. Everyone wants love, everyone falls in love, everyone loses love, and everyone knows something of love's madness. But the experience of obsessive love is no trivial matter. In the course of his career psychologist Dr Frank Tallis has treated many unusual patients, whose stories have lessons for all of us.

A barristers' clerk becomes convinced that her dentist has fallen in love with her and they are destined to be together for eternity; a widow is visited by the ghost of her dead husband; an academic is besotted with his own reflection; a beautiful woman searches jealously for a rival who isn't there; and a night porter is possessed by a lascivious demon. These are just some of the people whom we meet in an extraordinary and original book that explores the conditions of longing and desire - true accounts of psychotherapy that take the reader on a journey through the darker realms of the amorous mind.

Drawing on the latest scientific research into the biological and psychological mechanisms underlying romance and emotional attachment, The Incurable Romantic demonstrates that ultimately love dissolves the divide between what we judge to be normal and abnormal.

Review:

I have enjoyed The Incurable Romantic, in which psychotherapist Frank Tallis opens his casebook. There have been quite a few such books recently, most of them overpraised and not as well written as their admirers claim. But Tallis writes with clarity and wit about the morbid condition of love, which emerges here as a kind of mental disorder . . . riveting stuff (Sebastian Faulks Guardian)

A hugely entertaining, informative and often disturbing look at love in some of its strangest forms. Can't recommend it enough (Mark Billingham)

Compelling (Susie Orbach)

Fascinating and beautifully written (Brett Anderson)

Frank Tallis brings a lifetime's clinical experience and wise reflection to a condition that, by its own strange routes, leads us into the very heart of love itself. This is a brilliant, compelling book (Ian McEwan)

Thoughtful . . . Tallis has a graceful narrative style, easily incorporating brief digressions on deeper philosophical issues such as free will versus determinism. Most importantly, his book is suffused with compassion, avoiding facile categorization and struggling to understand and empathize with his patients as people in pain (Publishers Weekly)

A gifted storyteller . . . Tallis's characters remain sharply, painfully real, their stories as inconclusive, messy and fascinating as life (The Economist)

It is utterly compelling: the details, the dialogue, which bring each character, however heavily disguised, leaping off the page. Tallis's years of close observation might not always have solved his patients' problems . . . but they have helped turn him into a fine writer . . . He knows how to tell a story. Boy, does he know how to tell a story. This powerful and moving book is not just about individual cases. It's also about what the human animal needs . . . They are certainly enough here to create something that feels profoundly truthful. Something that feels, in fact, like an act of love (Christina Patterson Sunday Times)

[Tallis is] a brilliant raconteur with an acute ear for dialogue and sleuth-like capabilities. Only someone who has never felt sick falling head over heels, suffered the agonising pangs of jealousy, battled bestial fogs of lust or wallowed in the delirious happiness of being entwined with the object of their love could fail to be fascinated (Evening Standard)

Will interest anyone who wants to know what makes people tick . . . The Incurable Romantic earns its place in the fine tradition of popular psychoanalytic writing . . . an amiable and acute guide to the madness of love (The Times)

Book Description:

A fascinating account of a life investigating obsessive love, packed with intriguing true stories.

• Publisher: Abacus
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 0349142955
• ISBN 13: 9780349142951
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304